178 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. X*- 



weight, but how about the flavour ? The Nuhkta is not a bird which finds 

 much favour with most people as an article of food, though it makes very 

 good soup and not bad curry, and the ducklings when killed, just after 

 they have taken to the wing, are quite delicate and good. 



Though Hume never found any grain except wild rice in the stomachs 

 of the birds he examined, others, besides Tickell, have found that cultivated 

 rice forms one of the articles of their diet. They eat all sorts of shoots, 

 roots, seeds, etc., of water plants, varying this vegetarian food with a 

 little animal stuff now and then, such as worms, spawn, water larvae, 

 and perhaps an occasional fish. 



The voice of the Nukhta is, according to Legge, " a low guttural 

 quack-like sound, between the voice of a duck and a goose." The few 

 I have heard uttered loud cries which seemed to me far more like the 

 notes of a goose than a duck. A pair whose nest I afterwards found 

 used to herald my approach to their particular piece of water with loud 

 trumpet calls, uttered by them, when they first saw me, from their 

 perches high up in the tree. They roost, I believe, always in trees and 

 not in the water or on the ground, and they are not nocturnal or even 

 crepuscular birds in their habits, as are most of their order. 



The Comb Duck is one of those which invariably resort to trees for 

 nesting purposes, as a rule making a rough nest of grass and a few sticks 

 in some large natural hollow of a big tree, generally at no great height 

 from the ground. Sometimes, however, they build their nests in the 

 forks of the larger limbs, especially when three or four such branch out 

 together from the trunk itself. Occasionally they seem, like the Whist- 

 ling Teal and the Mallard, to make use of other birds' nests, for Mr. A. 

 Anderson found some eggs in the nest of a Halicetus leucoryphus 

 which he believed to have been laid by a Nukhta. Captain G. T. 

 L. Marshall also found an egg of Sarcidiorrtis in a nest of Dissura 

 episcopa. 



The only nest I have taken myself in North Cachar was placed in 

 a large tree standing by the edge of a small swamp, the latter completely 

 covered with dense ekra and grass, except for a few feet all round the 

 edge, and, even there, short weeds and water-plants almost hid the water 

 itself from sight. The nest, which was rather a large one of sticks 

 lined with grass roughly, was placed in a hollow between where the 

 first large boughs sprang from the bole of the tree. 



